American roots of 21st-century wars

"Ideas Have Consequences" was written by the young conservative scholar Richard Weaver, after he had witnessed the carnage World War II had visited upon his civilization. And if we look about the borderlands of Islam – Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank – we see the consequences of ideas advanced by two Americans whose influence is hard to overstate.

"All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," wrote Thomas Jefferson. "There is the revolutionary slogan, coming from the pen of a young, erudite, Virginia slave-holder," said historian D. W. Brogan. "The Revolution was on the march from that moment. It still is." With the triumph of the American Revolution, the handwriting was on the wall for every empire on earth.

In 1919, an even greater gravedigger of empire arrived in Paris preaching a doctrine of "self-determination" for all peoples. Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing realized Wilson had let the genie out of the bottle. "The phrase (self-determination) is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. ... What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!"